Watching Myself Watch Woody Allen Films

Allen’s new film, “Wonder Wheel,” which stars Kate Winslet, is a story of artistic aspirations and stifled dreams, of absent love and long-ago regret, of betrayal and deceit and, above all, of death.

Photograph by Atsushi Nishijima / Amazon / Everett

It would make life easier if Woody Allen’s movies were as easy and as
right to condemn as his behavior. But that’s not my experience of his
movies, and this makes it difficult both to watch and to write about
them. In 2014, Allen’s daughter Dylan Farrow wrote an open letter,
published in the Times, detailing her claims that Allen sexually molested her, on multiple occasions, when she was a child. Allen has denied wrongdoing. We cannot
say for sure what happened. I can say what I believe: I believe Dylan
Farrow. With considered queasiness, I have continued to watch Allen’s
films as they’re released, including his new one, “Wonder Wheel,” which
opens this weekend. It is strange and unpleasant to admit that I have
found many of them to be substantial experiences—and that much of their
power is inseparable from the accusations that have been made against
Allen.

When writing about Allen’s recent movies, I haven’t addressed the
over-all question of whether we can (or should) separate the artist from
the art. I’ve always considered that idea absurd, because the very
quality that makes movies worthwhile is how they express the
personality, the character, the ideas, the experiences of their makers.
The problem with learning about the artist from the art is that artists
sometimes reveal themselves to be troubled, troubling people, and bring to light their ugly traits, ideas, or even actions. The depth of a complex work that deals with horrific but authentic aspects of life is sometimes found in the artists’ personal implications in those parts of life.

There has always been something sexually sordid in Allen’s work. I
certainly wasn’t the only viewer who found one of the central
relationships in “Manhattan” (1980)—between Allen’s character, the
forty-two-year-old Isaac, and the seventeen-year-old Tracy (Mariel
Hemingway)—to be creepy. The sheer disparity of experience between a
successful television writer and a high-school student (even a smart and
talented one) adds an element of cavalier power to the relationship, one
that Isaac flaunts with his repeated insistence that it’s just a
short-term fling (whereas Tracy considers it to be love). The movie he
made next, “Stardust Memories,” is also one of his most unsavory, albeit
in sidelong details. In one scene, a teen-age girl calls the character
played by Allen “sexy”; and there is a long scene in which Allen’s
character, against the backdrop of a poster saying “incest,” defends
himself against the accusation of flirting with a girl of thirteen.

It wasn’t until “Crimes and Misdemeanors,” from 1989, that I grew
disgusted with Allen. In the film, he plays a documentary filmmaker named
Cliff whose most substantial and serious intellectual and personal
relationship is with his niece, Jenny (Jenny Nichols), whom he takes to
watch classic movies at the late, lamented Bleecker Street Cinema, and
to whom he pontificates cheerfully, innocently—basking in her admiration
while hardly giving her a chance to speak. Nothing illicit whatsoever is
depicted or implied. Yet Cliff’s intense interest in Jenny struck me,
when I first saw the movie, as an oblivious surrogate for a romantic
relationship, and I was repelled both by the movie’s tone and by Allen’s
apparent lack of awareness of the implications of what he was both
depicting and enacting.

The news, in 1992, of Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi Previn—the
daughter of Mia Farrow, with whom Allen was in a relationship at the
time—was, so to speak, a shock but not a surprise: he had expressed his
desires in his movies. Previn was thirty-five years his junior.
Allen had adopted two of Farrow’s children, Dylan and Moses, and Allen
and Farrow had a child together, Ronan (who writes for The New
Yorker). Farrow and Allen broke up; later that year, during their
battle over custody of their children, accusations emerged that Allen
had molested Dylan, who was then seven years old. I don’t remember
reading about the accusations at the time—I first became aware of them
in 2014, when Dylan published her piece in the Times. It’s entirely
possible that I had seen a headline or heard news back then but wrongly
dismissed the allegations as the sort of rumor that’s spread during a
bitter custody dispute. And if that’s so, it’s all too indicative of a
socially acceptable and widely confirmed indifference at the time to the
word of women regarding sexual improprieties.

More recently, I’ve realized that I had overlooked important personal
aspects of “Crimes and Misdemeanors.” The story has two main strands.
One involves a doctor (Martin Landau) who arranges for the murder of his
mistress (Anjelica Huston) after she threatens to tell his wife (Claire
Bloom) about their affair. The other shows the struggling Cliff—who is
attempting to make a documentary about a philosopher and Holocaust
survivor (Martin Bergmann)—accepting a well-paying job from his big-shot
TV-producer brother-in-law (Alan Alda), who uses his shows as his
personal sexual playground. As ugly as Cliff’s breezy relationship with
Jenny may be, the rest of the film plays like an anticipatory confession
not so much to actual crimes as to tormenting impulses. The lines of
dialogue, actions, and gestures suggest an impending moral cataclysm.
It’s a to-be-or-not-to-be film that evokes an unstable, agonizing
tension regarding evil desires and anticipation of evil deeds, and the
intensity of this guilt and torment has marked Allen’s films ever since.

In “Celebrity,” from 1999, sex is busting out all over, especially in the workplace, where media men shamelessly and aggressively pursue the
women in their work circles. The story of the film is essentially the
destructive force of desire on the work and the life of a serious
artist—and it ends with a literal, cosmic call for help (in the sky, via
an airplane’s skywriting). In “Hollywood Ending,” Allen plays a director
stricken with the Oedipal punishment of blindness—and whose cure
involves reconciliation with his estranged son and ex-wife. Still,
there’s an enervated, narrowed aspect to Allen’s films of the nineties
and early two-thousands. Allen had strolled the streets of New York City
and savored the city’s public pleasures with a simple and conspicuous
ardor, and now he couldn’t go out. He didn’t find his artistic energy
again until he became an exile of sorts. He went to Great Britain,
filmed “Match Point,” released in 2005, in London, and, with scant
regard to local mores and habits, using locations without much sociology
and characters without much context, created a stark, brisk, furious
melodrama that’s similar to “Crimes and Misdemeanors.” But where the
earlier film conjures a wide web of harrowing prospects while
distributing their expression among a wide range of characters, “Match
Point” condenses its action around one chilly, explicitly Dostoyevskian
megalomaniac, a young tennis pro named Chris (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a
thoroughgoing deceiver and cynic who plots to save his marriage by
killing his lover, Nola (Scarlett Johansson), and can neither bear the
prospect of getting away with it nor of getting caught. Like “Crimes and
Misdemeanors,” it’s a grandly and deftly theatrical flourish of
nihilism, a vision of the inescapable torments of conscience in a random
world of moral horror.

Allen’s later films don’t offer many specific observations, whether about
relationships or places. They’re films of ideas and emotions, realized
symbolically, with a mode of direction, of stylized performance, of fast
but spare writing, that wears its artifice as conspicuously as if it
were a series of musical production numbers. But their predominant
emotions and ideas involve self-loathing, self-destruction, and guilt;
crime, punishment, and non-punishment. Allen’s 2007 tragedy,
“Cassandra’s Dream,” leads swiftly from the tightening of family bonds
to howling catastrophe; his 2013 drama, “Blue Jasmine,” shows a spiral
of agonies issuing from a middle-aged man’s hidden crime, from his affair with a
nineteen-year-old woman—and from his wife’s quest for revenge. Allen
stages fantasy allusions to his own death in the 2006 murder comedy
“Scoop,” and in the 2015 murder drama “Irrational Man.” His chattily
comedic six-part series for Amazon, “Crisis in Six Scenes,” from 2016,
shows a character played by Allen getting away with a serious crime by
the power of his celebrity.

Of course, the recognition of evil feelings and impulses isn’t the sole
dominion of criminals, and guilt isn’t solely the torment of gross
offenders; the virtuous are all the more likely to feel guilt on the
basis of ordinary personal failings, the inherent tensions and conflicts
of even constructive family relationships, romances, and friendships,
ordinary compromises at work, a sense of responsibility for mere
day-to-day passivity, willed indifference, self-delusion. An artist who
can illuminate those powerful, ubiquitous, destructive, morally complex feelings and
dramatize them in a range of public and private contexts, from
professional to artistic to domestic, is one whose work is worth
experiencing. It’s a horrible paradox that the modern filmmaker who
explores those emotions most relentlessly, most painfully, and most
compellingly is one who is accused of doing things that would give him
good reason to feel them.

Allen’s new film, “Wonder Wheel,” is a story of artistic aspirations and
stifled dreams, of absent love and long-ago regret, of betrayal and
deceit and, above all, of death. The story is told from the perspective
of the young aspiring playwright Mickey (Justin Timberlake), who is
working as a lifeguard for the summer on Coney Island. Ginny (Kate
Winslet), a waitress in a clam house, is a former actress nearing forty
whose ambitions were smothered by desperate necessity. She’s married to
the loud, crude, simple, yet bighearted Humpty (Jim Belushi), who runs
the carousel in the amusement park, and her son from her previous
marriage, Richie (Jack Gore), lives with them in a crowded and
ramshackle seaside shack alongside it. Ginny and Mickey are having an
affair. But Carolina (Juno Temple), Humpty’s twentysomething daughter
with his first wife, suddenly turns up. Carolina had married a gangster
against Humpty’s wishes, and Humpty disowned her; now, divorced, and
fleeing hit men, she turns up at the shack seeking refuge, and Mickey,
meeting her by chance at the beach, falls in love with her.

Like all of Allen’s later films, the story’s practical connections are
flimsy and the characterizations are thin. But the tightly twisted
film-noir-like plot gives rise to terrifying bursts of rage and hatred,
spontaneous outpourings of tenderness, the mental clamor of
life-and-death desperation. Scattered throughout the film are hints of
torments, as when Ginny suggests that Humpty has an “unnatural
attachment” to Carolina; when Ginny, in a crisis of jealousy, berates
Carolina with angry and frantic questions: “Did he try anything? Did he
touch you? Did he take your hand? Did he do anything? Did he kiss you?”;
or when Mickey offers Ginny a book by Eugene O’Neill, saying that
O’Neill shows “how we have to lie to ourselves in order to live.”
There’s also the damaged, bewildered Richie, growing up amid betrayals
and deceptions and dangers and acting out as a pyromaniac. Through the
splashes of bright colors, the touches of local color, and the reverse
telescope of distant memory and period nostalgia, “Wonder Wheel”
virtually shrieks with confessional anguish and is scarred with
indelible regret.

It’s worth observing and lamenting the litany of victims in Allen’s
work—the Carolinas and the Nolas, the mistresses and the wives, the
girls getting undue attention and the lost, troubled boys. It’s a
distressing measure of Allen’s achievement that his films are a record
of their experience, as well—another measure of the inseparability of
the artist and the art. In the bleak realm of amoral horror and troubled
conscience that Allen depicts, he isn’t just a virtual character or
participant—he’s also an observer. He has been working in the movies for
half a century, and in entertainment even longer. The world that he
depicts in his films is one in which the powerful abuse their power to
prey upon the vulnerable and, until now, have, for the most part, gotten
away with it. It’s also a world that, because of the courageous
testimony of women including, crucially, Dylan Farrow, is now coming to
light and, perhaps, to change.